Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Ti
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enterprise Manager does make easily available several additional cost features, either embedded in the base
product or sold separately. You will look at how to control management access later in the chapter. It is important to be
clear that when using, for example, the performance pages discussed in Chapter 9, you are using a separately licensed
feature and not the free base product. as you will see when we discuss management pack access, you can use the packs
for this page link to determine the necessary license for any currently active page.
As Oracle expanded its product offering through the 2000s into middleware, applications, and beyond, it became
apparent that an enterprise-wide management tool would be a great advantage, and a source of additional revenue
for Oracle. Each of the products that Oracle sold, however, tended to have both built-in management capabilities and
internal teams that were experts in the management of their particular technology stack. Oracle settled on a solution
by ensuring that the existing teams developed management functionality for their product within the Enterprise
Manager product stack.
As we approached the end of that decade, Oracle's former database management product had become a fully
fledged enterprise technology management product, allowing management of all Oracle products and a few
third-party products via a centralized management console. There were, however, at least two structural problems
with the product as it matured:
•
Technology stack
•
Interface
Technology
The technology stack in use for the 10.x series of Enterprise Manager was Oracle's old J2EE application server
platform, Oracle Internet Application Server. Oracle had effectively given up on this platform a couple of years
previously with the purchase of the BEA WebLogic product line. The 11.x release of Grid Control migrated the existing
Grid Control product to the newer WebLogic technology stack, and integrated the database-derived Grid Control
interface with the newly developed Fusion Middleware Control that used Oracle's own Application Development
Framework (ADF). Enterprise Manager since 11g, therefore, has used the software stack shown in Figure
4-1
. This
architecture is likely to be current for at least the next five years.
ADF Presentation Layer
WebLogic Middleware
Oracle Database
Figure 4-1.
Oracle Enterprise Manager technology stack
However, all the technologies that Grid Control is able to manage advance, and all at different rates, and in some
cases at rates and directions outside the control of Oracle Corporation. The monolithic design of previous Enterprise
Manager releases meant that the product was, almost by design, permanently behind the release cycle of monitored
products. This situation meant that customers could patch monitored targets to address production issues and then
find that they could not obtain support for monitoring issues because the patched release was not certified with the
enterprise management product. Oracle has addressed this issue, and others, with the plug-in architecture of EM12c.
